Molière: The God of Laughter and the Mirror of 17th Century Society
Licentious, sanctimonious, adulterous, grovelling, miserly, hypocritical and deceitful of all kinds are the human characters that form the core of the cast of protagonists of the fascinating literary opus of one of the greatest, if not the greatest, comedian of all time, Jean-Baptiste Molière (1622-1673). This year marks the 400th…
Stefan Zweig: Why The Literary Giant Took His Own Life…
In his farewell letter, Stefan Zweig asked his Brazilian publisher for a modest funeral. The Brazilian government was unaware of this wish and considered it its duty to give him a state funeral as a great writer and friend of Brazil. Thus, on 24 February 1942, in the main school…
Émile Zola: The Writer Who Shook France with J’accuse!
On the evening of 18 July 1898, the writer Émile Zola disappeared. He had left the court accompanied by a military escort and amid loud shouts of disapproval and insults from a crowd of several hundred people. “Go back to Venice! Go back to the Jews! You coward!” echoed around.…
Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine: Poetry, Passion, and Tragedy
Brussels, 10 July 1873. Paul Verlaine, 29, poet. Arthur Rimbaud, 19, poet. Paul Verlaine holds up a gun. He had bought it to kill himself, now he pointed it at his young lover. He shot. One bullet hit him in the wrist, the other missed. He took him to hospital.…
J.R.R. Tolkien and the Creation of The Hobbit: The Birth of Modern Fantasy
“Once upon a time, a hobbit lived in a cave underground.” There is probably not a fan of the fantasy literature genre who would not recognise this at first glance somewhat obscure and perhaps ridiculous account. Yet this simple sentence laid the foundations for a rich fantasy story that –…
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: The Aviator Who Gave Us “The Little Prince”
On the twenty-fifth of May 1930, a young journalist visited a prizewinner of the French Academy. He came to see him on the very day he won the prize for his novel Wind, Sand and Stars. The young man knew very little about his interlocutor, except that he was an…
Edgar Allan Poe: The Haunted Life Behind the Genius of Gothic Literature
When Edgar Allan Poe began writing, American literature was still in its infancy. While his peers were imitating English authors and writing educational poems, he was inventing his own language. He was considered a strange and difficult man, prone to alcohol. He was the first American writer who lived solely…
How Renaissance Women Redefined Art, Power, and Independence
Out of the foam of the Renaissance waves, as beautiful as the Venus painted by Botticelli, naked and innocent, a modern woman emerged, ready to enter a world that had been out of her reach. The Renaissance is placed by many in 1492, when Lorenzo de' Medici died and Rodrigo…
William Chester Minor: The Murderer Who Helped Build the Oxford English Dictionary
In the second half of the 19th century, the British Empire was at the height of its power. At that time, one in five people on earth was a subject of Queen Victoria, and the British flag flew majestically in every corner of the globe. British economic and military dominance…
The Woman Who Created Frankenstein: Mary Shelley’s Unseen Struggles
For the writer Mary Shelley, resisting social norms was practically laid in the cradle: she was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 - 1797), for many the world's first feminist. Mary campaigned for women's equality and freedom at a time when women were more or less the property of their…
